The Alchemist of Souls (Night's Masque, #1)(114)

Sandy went limp underneath him, and the sky darkened.

"Sandy? Oh Sweet Jesu, no!"

Mal looked about him, but the woods were empty. They had been abandoned here, cast out by the Huntsmen for their cowardice. The stink of woodsmoke and burnt flesh drifted on the night breeze. Mal felt something tug at him, deep inside: an instinct like that of a homing pigeon.

"Come on, Sandy, get up!"

He shook his brother, who moaned but did not wake. Mal felt dampness on his cheeks and tried to wipe it away. Not tears. Blood. He scrambled to his feet and heaved his brother up and over his shoulder.

At first the going wasn't too difficult. Deer tracks led through the bracken, in roughly the direction Mal wanted to go. He stumbled along, bent under Sandy's dead weight. Sweat dripped into his eyes and trickled down his back. His limbs were heavy and sluggish, as if he were wading through water. It was as much as he could do to put one foot in front of the other. Then another. And another.

After a while he felt, rather than saw, the trees give way to open moorland, wreathed in mist. Far above, the sky swirled with silver and lead and palest gold. Not a creature moved across that dead landscape, nor any bird sang.

The inner call tugged at him again, and he staggered onward. The earth was lumpen here, bound together in tussocks of dry, slippery grass, impossible to walk across without turning an ankle, even unburdened. And the creatures were circling, just on the fringes of his vision. He wanted to drop Sandy and run, but then they would both be dead. He wished Kiiren would come, with his bright light that drove away the nightmares.

Nightmares. This was just another dream. He stopped and looked about him, and the creatures faded away into the dark. And Sandy… Sandy was gone too. They had taken him and they were going to kill him. Mal broke into a run, leaping from tussock to tussock and then into the air, running across the roiling mist as if it were solid ground.

There. A glow in the mist below him, warm and welcoming, like candlelight. He dived towards it, but at the last moment pulled back. This must be done gently, instinct told him. His feet touched earth once more. No, not earth, nor grass, but an uneven pavement of small stone blocks with weeds growing in the cracks. A wall of pale golden light, shot through with rainbow colours like a soap bubble, shimmered just beyond the reach of his fingertips. Smiling, he stepped through it–

Coby woke from a dream in which she had been sewing pieces of red and gold silk onto the walls of the theatre whilst Master Naismith tried to distract her with readings from Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris. Then she remembered, and her heart contracted with grief.

On the bed beside her, Master Catlyn smiled in his sleep. She smiled back, then to her surprise he sat up, eyes wide and unseeing. Moving slowly he got to his feet, pulled on his boots and began to walk towards the night-black window. She opened her mouth to call out his name, but the words died on her lips. As she watched, the window melted away, becoming a tunnel through trees whose branches laced overhead, shimmering green in the sunlight. She glanced away for a moment, back towards the darkened room. The faint glow of the skrayling lamp illuminated the walls and floor, cold as Thames water. It was still night. She turned to the window again. In the tunnel it was daylight. She clutched the cross about her neck and whispered a prayer.

As he moved towards the mouth of the tunnel, another figure appeared at its far end, his mirror image in all but dress: another Master Catlyn, thin-faced and shabby but unmistakable. The missing twin. Sandy raised his arms in greeting and Mal stepped into the tunnel. Coby sprang up from the bed with a cry – but the sunlight flared and she was thrown back, blinded.

When she opened her eyes again, Mal – and the tunnel – were gone.

CHAPTER XXX

Mal staggered and fell against the edge of the bed.

"Hendricks?"

He blinked, trying to make out the pale shape in the darkness. The figure on the bed stirred and sat up.

"Rehi?"

The voice was familiar, even as the word itself hovered on the brink of meaning. Brother.

"Sandy?" Mal scrambled onto the bed, grasping his brother's shoulders. "What are you doing here?"

He looked about the room. This was not the Tower. Two arched windows, rather than a rectangular one, and on the wrong side of the bed to boot.

"Where am I?"

His eyes were adjusting to the darkness now. The room was about the same size as the one he had been in moments ago, but with bare stone walls instead of panels and plaster. The windows were glazed on the inside; on the outside, thick iron bars set into pale, fresh mortar spanned each narrow opening. Through them Mal could make out a lawn running down to the dark moonlight-flecked surface of a river, and on the opposite bank, a vast dark shape, all high crenellated walls and towers. A faint gleam of candlelight revealed windows here and there, some far above the ground. A palace or castle by the river. Was he in Southwark, looking north towards the Tower, or somewhere else entirely? Only daylight would tell.

Sandy came over to stand at the other window. He began to sing softly, this time in English.

"Then woe is me, poor child for Thee!

And every mourn and say,

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay."

"Sandy?"

His brother did not respond, only stared out into the darkness. He was dressed in a fine woollen doublet and hose, a little worn around the seams like a rich man's cast-offs, and a crisp new linen shirt. His hair had been cut short and he was cleanshaven. Only the manacles around his wrists, and the fetters on his ankles, betrayed the fact he was no guest here.